From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Options when placing images - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Options when placing images

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- [Instructor] We've already discussed how to place an image into InDesign, but only just the basics. Now I want to show you a few important features that help you place multiple images quickly and give you more control over how images get placed. If you need to place a bunch of graphics, you don't want to have to place them one at a time. For example, let's open the Place dialog box by choosing Place from the File menu. Here, you can select multiple images by clicking on one and then holding down the cmd or ctrl key while selecting another. Let's go ahead and add one more here, and then we'll just grab this one as well. Now, all four images are selected inside this dialog box, so I'll go ahead and click Open, and you'll see that all the images get loaded up onto the Place cursor. You can tell that there are four, because there's a little blue four inside parentheses right next to the cursor. In fact, you can actually move through the images one at a time by pressing the left or right arrow keys on the keyboard. When I find the image I want, I simply click. I clicked on top of an empty frame, so InDesign placed that image into it. Now the cursor changed because I only have three more images to go. So I can choose the image I want, click, click, and then this image over here, I don't really need that, so I'm going to let go of it by pressing the Escape key on my keyboard. Now it's gone. Okay, now I'm going to show you two more techniques for importing images. First, I'll open the Place dialog box again, but this time by pressing cmd + d on the Mac or ctrl + d on Windows. I'll scroll down and choose this file called HP_Logos.ai. This is an Illustrator file with multiple artboards, but this same technique would also work with a PDF file that has multiple pages. When you have a file that has multiple pages or artboards, you can tell InDesign which page or artboard you actually want to import. To do that, turn on the Show Import Options checkbox right here in the Place dialog box. Show Import Options tells InDesign that when you click the Open button, it should open a new dialog box, one that gives you some options. So here we can see that there are three different pages or artboards in this document, and we can actually move through them one at a time to see what's on there. I could import all of them if I want to by clicking the All button over here, or you could import a range. Let's just import the first and second artboard, then we'll click OK and InDesign loads those up onto the Place cursor. I don't need it here, so I'm going to scroll up to the previous spread and click on this empty graphic frame. That looks good. And you know, I don't really need that second graphic after all, so I'm going to throw it away by pressing the Escape key. Okay, let's import one more picture, but this time we're going to drag it right out of a folder on the desktop. First, switch back to the Finder or Windows Explorer, depending on your operating system, by pressing cmd + tab on the Mac or alt + tab on Windows. Here, I have the same Links folder open from the Exercise Files, and I'm going to grab the image that I want and just drag it in. I just drag it on top of the InDesign window, and when I let go of the mouse button, it doesn't look like anything happened. But as soon as I switch back to InDesign, you'll see that the Place cursor has been loaded. That's the image that I had selected on the desktop. Now I can simply drag at a frame and InDesign drops the graphic into it. Images are a critical part of most InDesign workflows. The more you can control how you import them, the more efficient you're going to be in this program.

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